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Today's News (2020/3/2)
Mar. 2nd, 2020 08:56 pmBeen swamped. Here are a few important things.
-----
The First Days of the Trump Regime
The president has interpreted the Republican-controlled Senate’s vote to acquit as a writ of absolute power.
FEBRUARY 19, 2020
Adam Serwer
Staff writer at The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/trump-regime/606682/
There are two kinds of Republican senators who voted to acquit Donald Trump in his impeachment trial two weeks ago: those who acknowledged he was guilty and voted to acquit anyway, and those who pretended the president had done nothing wrong.
“It was wrong for President Trump to mention former Vice President Biden on that phone call, and it was wrong for him to ask a foreign country to investigate a political rival,” Senator Susan Collins of Maine declared, but added that removing him “could have unpredictable and potentially adverse consequences for public confidence in our electoral process.”
But Collins, like her Republican colleagues Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, was an outlier in admitting the president’s conduct was wrong. Most others in the caucus, like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, deliberately missed the point, insisting that Democrats wanted the president removed for “pausing aid to Ukraine for a few weeks.”
What all these senators share is a willingness to ignore the nature of the offense. Both Collins, who has worked in government in some capacity since the 1970s, and Cotton, a Harvard-educated attorney, understood the basic constitutional arguments for removing a president who attempts to rig a reelection campaign in his favor, which is why they simply ignored them. Collins insisted that the matter be decided by the forthcoming election, disregarding the fact that Trump was impeached because he tried to use his official powers to manipulate that election, while Cotton simply pretended to be clueless about what was at issue.
The ambiguity of these two positions obscures the clarity with which the president and his attorney general, William Barr, have interpreted the acquittal vote. The Senate’s vote to acquit Trump of the impeachment charges he faced, despite the incontrovertible proof that he sought to use his official powers to force a foreign country to falsely implicate a political rival, was not simply a vote to keep him in office until the electorate can render its verdict. Republican senators affirmatively voted to allow the president to use his official powers to suppress the opposition party, to purge government employees who proved more loyal to the Constitution than to Trump, and to potentially prosecute or otherwise criminally implicate his political enemies without lawful cause, while shielding Trump allies from legal sanction. The acquittal vote ratified the authoritarian instincts of the president and the ideological convictions of his attorney general.
The most generous interpretation of the votes of Collins, Murkowski, and Alexander is that the senators believed they were staving off a greater crisis of democracy. But in the eyes of the president, their votes for acquittal were cast to install him as a strongman.
Authoritarian nations come in many different stripes, but they all share a fundamental characteristic: The people who live in them are not allowed to freely choose their own leaders. This is why Republican Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, in his speech announcing his vote to convict on the first article of impeachment, said that “corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.”
Democracies are sustained through the formal process by which power is contested and exchanged. Once that process is corrupted, you have merely the trappings of democracy within an authoritarian regime. Such governments may retain elections and courts and legislatures, but those institutions have no power to enforce the rule of law. America is not there yet—but the acquittal vote was a fateful step in that direction.
-----
Trump’s Quiet Power Grab
The president’s administration is attempting to bring thousands of federal employees under his control, and the public is largely unaware.
February 26, 2020
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/trumps-quiet-power-grab/607087/
Throughout the federal government are thousands of officials who do not direct courtrooms, but who are, in a sense, judges. They are federal employees who preside over trial-like disputes, hear evidence and testimony, and make decisions that can deeply shape people’s lives, such as the granting of asylum and veterans benefits. These executive-branch employees are administrative adjudicators.
The Trump administration has launched an obscure but dangerous effort to undermine this system, and to dictate both the appropriate circumstances for commencing adjudication and the rules that govern how disputes with agencies are resolved. If the Trump administration’s strategy works, it will have steered the federal bureaucracy further toward an authoritarian future in which all executive-branch policy making must bend to the whims of a single individual, the president.
Although precise data are hard to find, recent work by two leading administrative-law scholars suggests there are roughly 12,000 of these agency adjudicators of various types across the federal bureaucracy, as compared with about 870 permanently authorized federal-court judges. Though the number of matters these adjudicators handle is very hard to come by, a 2016 estimate suggests that they decide more than 750,000 cases annually, which would be about double the number of civil and criminal felony case filings in federal district court.
A plurality of administrative adjudications involve Social Security disability claims. But there is extensive variety among the several hundred agencies and programs involved in administrative adjudication. Some agencies, such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, engage in licensing. Others, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Trade Commission, impose penalties for legal noncompliance. Numerous adjudication schemes across multiple agencies involve disputes about government payments, the awarding and administration of government contracts and benefits, and the imposition of employee discipline. A database created by Stanford Law School and the Administrative Conference of the United States numbers these programs and the agencies involved in the hundreds.
The public is, for the most part, quite oblivious to much of this activity’s scope and importance, much less the Trump administration’s attacks on its integrity. What is at stake is not the specific resolution of individual disputes—at least not thus far—but rather the authority to dictate the general rules by which agencies decide individual cases, cases in which accuracy and impartiality are key values.
-----
A court just brutally ripped the mask off Trump’s cruelty
By Greg Sargent
Opinion writer
Feb. 28, 2020
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/28/court-just-brutally-ripped-mask-off-trumps-cruelty/
President Trump loves to boast about his efforts to make it as hard as possible for desperate migrants to seek refuge in the United States. In his State of the Union speech, he cited many of them, including his policy of making asylum seekers wait in Mexico, while crowing that “border crossings” are going down “very rapidly.”
But now that policy has suffered a major setback in court. And the ruling is particularly notable for its harsh depiction of this program in all its naked cruelty.
The ruling in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s injunction on the policy, which is known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP. The underlying merits of the lawsuit, which was brought by asylum seekers who had returned to Mexico and groups representing them, still have to be litigated, but in blocking it, the court ruled that the plaintiffs would likely succeed on the merits.
-----
[THREAD. Long thread, and for Twitter, a long _read_, but important.]
Gwen Snyder is uncivil
twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL
112/
https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1234535167689097216
Privilege teaches the privileged that we OUGHT to be Day 2 preachers.
We DESERVE to be Day 2 preachers.
The Day 2 preachers, though? They aren't leading the congregation. They didn't build the church.
They haven't even finished reading The Book, yet.
They're hijackers.
[START OF THREAD: https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1234475626586935296 ]
-----
A Trump Insider Embeds Climate Denial in Scientific Research
Hiroko Tabuchi
March 2, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/climate/goks-uncertainty-language-interior.html
An official at the Interior Department embarked on a campaign that has inserted misleading language about climate change — including debunked claims that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is beneficial — into the agency’s scientific reports, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The misleading language appears in at least nine reports, including environmental studies and impact statements on major watersheds in the American West that could be used to justify allocating increasingly scarce water to farmers at the expense of wildlife conservation and fisheries.
The effort was led by Indur M. Goklany, a longtime Interior Department employee who, in 2017 near the start of the Trump administration, was promoted to the office of the deputy secretary with responsibility for reviewing the agency’s climate policies. The Interior Department’s scientific work is the basis for critical decisions about water and mineral rights affecting millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of acres of land.
The wording, known internally as the “Goks uncertainty language” based on Mr. Goklany’s nickname, inaccurately claims that there is a lack of consensus among scientists that the earth is warming. In Interior Department emails to scientists, Mr. Goklany pushed misleading interpretations of climate science, saying it “may be overestimating the rate of global warming, for whatever reason;” climate modeling has largely predicted global warming accurately. The final language states inaccurately that some studies have found the earth to be warming, while others have not.
He also instructed department scientists to add that rising carbon dioxide — the main force driving global warming — is beneficial because it “may increase plant water use efficiency” and “lengthen the agricultural growing season.” Both assertions misrepresent the scientific consensus that, overall, climate change will result in severe disruptions to global agriculture and significant reductions in crop yields.
-----
New coronavirus cases in Western Washington are likely doubling every 6 days, Fred Hutch scientist says
March 2, 2020
By Mike Carter
Seattle Times staff reporter
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/new-coronavirus-cases-in-western-washington-are-likely-doubling-every-6-days-fred-hutch-scientist-says/
A genetics and infectious disease expert at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center said Tuesday that additional analysis of the spread of the novel coronavirus using genetic markers has led to him conclude that as many as 570 Washington residents may have contracted the virus, many of them without knowing it, and have been spreading it through the community with Snohomish County as the outbreak’s center.
Trevor Bedford had posted some of his initial findings on Twitter over the weekend, concluding that the genetic relationship between the first case of the disease caused by the virus, COVID-19 — reported in Washington in January — was so genetically similar to the second case reported on Feb. 23 that they almost certainly came from the same source. Bedford said that the transmission likely began with an individual whose infection was missed because early guidelines limited testing to individuals who had traveled from China. He concluded, however, that the coronavirus, also known as SARS-CoV-2, was moving quietly through the community, a fact health officials acknowledged Monday as they declared a health emergency and announced six people have died from the disease in Washington.
-----
[NOTE: THIS IS FROM 2014 - but still relevant]
Researchers: Police likely provoke protestors — not the other way around
New research from Berkeley shows that police are often the agitators of violence
Ian Blair
August 22, 2014 11:00PM (UTC)
https://www.salon.com/test/2014/08/22/researchers_police_likely_provoke_protestors_%E2%80%94_not_the_other_way_around/
New research from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that police are often the provocateurs of violence during demonstrations.
The Deciding Force project, who has been studying clashes between law enforcement and protestors in 192 cities during Occupy demonstrations in 2011, said that attacks by police against protesters in Ferguson, Mo., are part of a disturbing trend of law enforcement playing the role of agitator.
"Everything starts to turn bad when you see a police officer come out of an SUV and he's carrying an AR-15," said Nick Adams, a sociologist and fellow at UC Berkeley's Institute for Data Science who has been heading the research at the Deciding Force Project. "It just upsets the crowd.”
-----
The First Days of the Trump Regime
The president has interpreted the Republican-controlled Senate’s vote to acquit as a writ of absolute power.
FEBRUARY 19, 2020
Adam Serwer
Staff writer at The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/trump-regime/606682/
There are two kinds of Republican senators who voted to acquit Donald Trump in his impeachment trial two weeks ago: those who acknowledged he was guilty and voted to acquit anyway, and those who pretended the president had done nothing wrong.
“It was wrong for President Trump to mention former Vice President Biden on that phone call, and it was wrong for him to ask a foreign country to investigate a political rival,” Senator Susan Collins of Maine declared, but added that removing him “could have unpredictable and potentially adverse consequences for public confidence in our electoral process.”
But Collins, like her Republican colleagues Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, was an outlier in admitting the president’s conduct was wrong. Most others in the caucus, like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, deliberately missed the point, insisting that Democrats wanted the president removed for “pausing aid to Ukraine for a few weeks.”
What all these senators share is a willingness to ignore the nature of the offense. Both Collins, who has worked in government in some capacity since the 1970s, and Cotton, a Harvard-educated attorney, understood the basic constitutional arguments for removing a president who attempts to rig a reelection campaign in his favor, which is why they simply ignored them. Collins insisted that the matter be decided by the forthcoming election, disregarding the fact that Trump was impeached because he tried to use his official powers to manipulate that election, while Cotton simply pretended to be clueless about what was at issue.
The ambiguity of these two positions obscures the clarity with which the president and his attorney general, William Barr, have interpreted the acquittal vote. The Senate’s vote to acquit Trump of the impeachment charges he faced, despite the incontrovertible proof that he sought to use his official powers to force a foreign country to falsely implicate a political rival, was not simply a vote to keep him in office until the electorate can render its verdict. Republican senators affirmatively voted to allow the president to use his official powers to suppress the opposition party, to purge government employees who proved more loyal to the Constitution than to Trump, and to potentially prosecute or otherwise criminally implicate his political enemies without lawful cause, while shielding Trump allies from legal sanction. The acquittal vote ratified the authoritarian instincts of the president and the ideological convictions of his attorney general.
The most generous interpretation of the votes of Collins, Murkowski, and Alexander is that the senators believed they were staving off a greater crisis of democracy. But in the eyes of the president, their votes for acquittal were cast to install him as a strongman.
Authoritarian nations come in many different stripes, but they all share a fundamental characteristic: The people who live in them are not allowed to freely choose their own leaders. This is why Republican Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, in his speech announcing his vote to convict on the first article of impeachment, said that “corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.”
Democracies are sustained through the formal process by which power is contested and exchanged. Once that process is corrupted, you have merely the trappings of democracy within an authoritarian regime. Such governments may retain elections and courts and legislatures, but those institutions have no power to enforce the rule of law. America is not there yet—but the acquittal vote was a fateful step in that direction.
-----
Trump’s Quiet Power Grab
The president’s administration is attempting to bring thousands of federal employees under his control, and the public is largely unaware.
February 26, 2020
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/trumps-quiet-power-grab/607087/
Throughout the federal government are thousands of officials who do not direct courtrooms, but who are, in a sense, judges. They are federal employees who preside over trial-like disputes, hear evidence and testimony, and make decisions that can deeply shape people’s lives, such as the granting of asylum and veterans benefits. These executive-branch employees are administrative adjudicators.
The Trump administration has launched an obscure but dangerous effort to undermine this system, and to dictate both the appropriate circumstances for commencing adjudication and the rules that govern how disputes with agencies are resolved. If the Trump administration’s strategy works, it will have steered the federal bureaucracy further toward an authoritarian future in which all executive-branch policy making must bend to the whims of a single individual, the president.
Although precise data are hard to find, recent work by two leading administrative-law scholars suggests there are roughly 12,000 of these agency adjudicators of various types across the federal bureaucracy, as compared with about 870 permanently authorized federal-court judges. Though the number of matters these adjudicators handle is very hard to come by, a 2016 estimate suggests that they decide more than 750,000 cases annually, which would be about double the number of civil and criminal felony case filings in federal district court.
A plurality of administrative adjudications involve Social Security disability claims. But there is extensive variety among the several hundred agencies and programs involved in administrative adjudication. Some agencies, such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, engage in licensing. Others, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Trade Commission, impose penalties for legal noncompliance. Numerous adjudication schemes across multiple agencies involve disputes about government payments, the awarding and administration of government contracts and benefits, and the imposition of employee discipline. A database created by Stanford Law School and the Administrative Conference of the United States numbers these programs and the agencies involved in the hundreds.
The public is, for the most part, quite oblivious to much of this activity’s scope and importance, much less the Trump administration’s attacks on its integrity. What is at stake is not the specific resolution of individual disputes—at least not thus far—but rather the authority to dictate the general rules by which agencies decide individual cases, cases in which accuracy and impartiality are key values.
-----
A court just brutally ripped the mask off Trump’s cruelty
By Greg Sargent
Opinion writer
Feb. 28, 2020
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/28/court-just-brutally-ripped-mask-off-trumps-cruelty/
President Trump loves to boast about his efforts to make it as hard as possible for desperate migrants to seek refuge in the United States. In his State of the Union speech, he cited many of them, including his policy of making asylum seekers wait in Mexico, while crowing that “border crossings” are going down “very rapidly.”
But now that policy has suffered a major setback in court. And the ruling is particularly notable for its harsh depiction of this program in all its naked cruelty.
The ruling in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s injunction on the policy, which is known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP. The underlying merits of the lawsuit, which was brought by asylum seekers who had returned to Mexico and groups representing them, still have to be litigated, but in blocking it, the court ruled that the plaintiffs would likely succeed on the merits.
-----
[THREAD. Long thread, and for Twitter, a long _read_, but important.]
Gwen Snyder is uncivil
twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL
112/
https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1234535167689097216
Privilege teaches the privileged that we OUGHT to be Day 2 preachers.
We DESERVE to be Day 2 preachers.
The Day 2 preachers, though? They aren't leading the congregation. They didn't build the church.
They haven't even finished reading The Book, yet.
They're hijackers.
[START OF THREAD: https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1234475626586935296 ]
-----
A Trump Insider Embeds Climate Denial in Scientific Research
Hiroko Tabuchi
March 2, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/climate/goks-uncertainty-language-interior.html
An official at the Interior Department embarked on a campaign that has inserted misleading language about climate change — including debunked claims that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is beneficial — into the agency’s scientific reports, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The misleading language appears in at least nine reports, including environmental studies and impact statements on major watersheds in the American West that could be used to justify allocating increasingly scarce water to farmers at the expense of wildlife conservation and fisheries.
The effort was led by Indur M. Goklany, a longtime Interior Department employee who, in 2017 near the start of the Trump administration, was promoted to the office of the deputy secretary with responsibility for reviewing the agency’s climate policies. The Interior Department’s scientific work is the basis for critical decisions about water and mineral rights affecting millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of acres of land.
The wording, known internally as the “Goks uncertainty language” based on Mr. Goklany’s nickname, inaccurately claims that there is a lack of consensus among scientists that the earth is warming. In Interior Department emails to scientists, Mr. Goklany pushed misleading interpretations of climate science, saying it “may be overestimating the rate of global warming, for whatever reason;” climate modeling has largely predicted global warming accurately. The final language states inaccurately that some studies have found the earth to be warming, while others have not.
He also instructed department scientists to add that rising carbon dioxide — the main force driving global warming — is beneficial because it “may increase plant water use efficiency” and “lengthen the agricultural growing season.” Both assertions misrepresent the scientific consensus that, overall, climate change will result in severe disruptions to global agriculture and significant reductions in crop yields.
-----
New coronavirus cases in Western Washington are likely doubling every 6 days, Fred Hutch scientist says
March 2, 2020
By Mike Carter
Seattle Times staff reporter
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/new-coronavirus-cases-in-western-washington-are-likely-doubling-every-6-days-fred-hutch-scientist-says/
A genetics and infectious disease expert at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center said Tuesday that additional analysis of the spread of the novel coronavirus using genetic markers has led to him conclude that as many as 570 Washington residents may have contracted the virus, many of them without knowing it, and have been spreading it through the community with Snohomish County as the outbreak’s center.
Trevor Bedford had posted some of his initial findings on Twitter over the weekend, concluding that the genetic relationship between the first case of the disease caused by the virus, COVID-19 — reported in Washington in January — was so genetically similar to the second case reported on Feb. 23 that they almost certainly came from the same source. Bedford said that the transmission likely began with an individual whose infection was missed because early guidelines limited testing to individuals who had traveled from China. He concluded, however, that the coronavirus, also known as SARS-CoV-2, was moving quietly through the community, a fact health officials acknowledged Monday as they declared a health emergency and announced six people have died from the disease in Washington.
-----
[NOTE: THIS IS FROM 2014 - but still relevant]
Researchers: Police likely provoke protestors — not the other way around
New research from Berkeley shows that police are often the agitators of violence
Ian Blair
August 22, 2014 11:00PM (UTC)
https://www.salon.com/test/2014/08/22/researchers_police_likely_provoke_protestors_%E2%80%94_not_the_other_way_around/
New research from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that police are often the provocateurs of violence during demonstrations.
The Deciding Force project, who has been studying clashes between law enforcement and protestors in 192 cities during Occupy demonstrations in 2011, said that attacks by police against protesters in Ferguson, Mo., are part of a disturbing trend of law enforcement playing the role of agitator.
"Everything starts to turn bad when you see a police officer come out of an SUV and he's carrying an AR-15," said Nick Adams, a sociologist and fellow at UC Berkeley's Institute for Data Science who has been heading the research at the Deciding Force Project. "It just upsets the crowd.”
